The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

Love is a great master. It teaches us to be what we never were.

Most people die from the remedy rather than from the illness.

People spend most of their lives worrying about things that never happen.

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.